The relationship between social status, stress and health has generated a wide literature in social sciences. Its extensive coverage includes empirical research on social gradient in health, as well as the impact of social comparison, relative deprivation, discrimination and social stress on health status. Building on these explorations, recently there has been much interest in the mechanism underlying the social gradient in health (the negative relationship between morbidity/mortality and socioeconomic status). It is one of the points of investigation in biomedical research at the moment.
The present article offers an overview of one of the most successful theoretical frameworks in biomedical research on interactions between society and health – cultural consonance model. Formulated by William Dressler as a result of two decades of empirical research on health disparities in the United States and Brazil, cultural consonance offers insight into the relationship between individual’s inability to live up to a societal standard in their behavior or lifestyle, and negative health outcomes. In the present publication the intellectual roots, up-to-date key findings and current directions in cultural consonance research are discussed.